William Walker’s First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story

MAY

‘Marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle,and not a bed of roses.’

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,

Virginibus Puerisque (1881)

Sunday 1 May

I never had a threesome.

I never had an orgy.

I never slept with anyone from Sweden. Or Norway.

I never slept with a Scandinavian full stop.

I never slept with anyone with tattoos or pink hair or non-facial piercings or a career in pornography.

I never slept with Mrs Robinson.

I never slept with any married woman, and no, last night doesn’t count because she was married to me.

Yesterday, I married Isabel, the girl of my dreams. Fantastic. I am married. Superb. I am a husband. Brilliant. I’ll never sleep with another woman again so long as we both shall live.

‘Hello, husband. I think I’m going to be sick.’ These were the first words she said when she woke. Isabel. My beautiful wife.

‘Morning, Mrs Walker.’

Despite the hangover, she starts trampolining around the four-poster, singing ‘I’ve go-ot married yes-t’day morning’ to the tune of ‘I’m getting married in the morning’, which doesn’t fit. She sings like someone being stabbed in a shower: all commitment, no tonal control. This is not because she’s singing and fighting back the urge to vomit. This is how she normally sings. It is one of her many endearing qualities.

‘Mrs Walker. I like that. So much better than Miss Brackett.’

‘This is why you married me? For my surname?’

‘Yes, that’s it. Couldn’t go another year as a Brackett.’

‘Well, now you’re a Walker. Any second thoughts?’

‘Yes. I wish I hadn’t drunk so much.’

‘No, about being, well, married.’

Until this morning, I’ve never had any second thoughts—well, not officially. Not so as to cause alarm. But from the moment I asked the woman I love to marry me, I’ve been expecting her to look dazed for a minute or two, blink a few times as if risen suddenly from a twelve-month coma, then look at me, look at the engagement ring and start screaming, ‘Marry you?! Are you mad?’ She could, I’m sure, even if I’m being objective, have had the pick of the field. A girl who looks even more beautiful in jeans and T-shirt than make-up and cocktail dress, an effortlessly glamorous head-turner, the sort of girl, honestly, you’d be quite chuffed to go on a date with. And I’ve got her to agree to spend the rest of her life with me. It’s ridiculous.

‘No, darling. No second thoughts. Even if you did knock the vicar out on my wedding day.’

If you ask Johnson, the world’s most pessimistic usher, he’ll tell you the wedding was a disaster. This is because he sees a friend getting married in the same way everyone else might see a friend being sent to prison. For life. He hasn’t enjoyed his decade of matrimonial bliss.

If you ask me, the wedding had gone pretty well. Compared to what I’d imagined. It had taken several Bishop’s Nipples the night before to convince the vicar I was not the infidel even though I only went to church once a year. After that, he’d been an absolute angel, until he’d fallen down the steps of his own church and come a cropper on the pew. I and a large part of the congregation had thought for several seconds that he had actually killed himself, but a glass of holy water brought him back from the brink. When he regained consciousness, he claimed I pushed him. I don’t think I did…I may have brushed past him as I helped Isabel and her dress turn, ready for the you-may-kiss-the-bride-and-get-out-of-here bit. Nothing he could do by then: we were already married.

And, despite Johnson’s grave warnings beforehand and rolling eyes during, everything else went okay.

My tailored suit (posted from Hong Kong because do you know how much tailored tails cost in London?) had, miraculously, fitted. The Corsa (89,452 miles) had started. And Isabel, despite her ‘best friend’ Alex and his ridiculous equine chauffeur service, had got to the church on time.

I had been forbidden to look her in the eye ‘emotionally’ or ‘with significance’ at any stage during the service for fear of opening her floodgates. ‘I don’t want to do an Alison,’ she had explained quite reasonably. Who could forget Alison’s wedding? It had taken hours, maybe days, for her to sob, squeak and warble her way through the vows. By the time she reached ‘till…sob…death…sob, sob, sob…do us…sniff…part’, we all thought she was going to illustrate her point by collapsing on the spot. RIP Alison who died at her wedding from dehydration.

Despite the threats, I had felt an overwhelming urge to burst into tears myself from the moment Isabel rounded the corner and began the walk. Quite hard not to, what with all your friends and family going ‘ooohh’ and ‘ahhh’, and seeing the dress for the first time. An amazing Sixties number, not at all like the explosion in a meringue factory you get normally. Then there’s the mysterious veil and the accompanying trumpet voluntary and your mum already blubbing away in her purple hat. Is this really not too much for any man to cope with? Did whoever invented weddings not add all this extra stuff to make it absolutely inevitable that the poor sap waiting up at the altar would weep deep tears of joy/run a thousand miles/pass out on the spot?

Isabel did what she always does when she’s trying not to cry: she laughed, hysterically. She walked the entire length of the church laughing and blinking back tears, her dress and variable bridesmaids flowing behind her. Only in the last few feet did her eyes meet mine. She smiled; I smiled back with as little significance as I could muster—a sort of thin-lipped, cold-eyed, non-bothered smirk, the kind you’d throw a kid on a bike when he calls you a fecker. She burst into tears anyway.

Still, I passed the four tests…

THE FOUR TESTS OF A BRIDEGROOM

1 The vows. Don’t shout them, don’t whimper them, don’t faint during them. Easy.

2 The speech. Thank everyone—but mainly in-laws, look happy, declare love for new wife and make bridesmaids cry. Had to follow Isabel’s father, who did ten minutes on the traumas of her breech birth and made two members of the audience physically sick. Did fine, though, compared to Andy. I’d chosen him as best man over Johnson because he worked in the diplomatic corps and I’d remembered those Ferrero Rocher ads. As Isabel pointed out, he wasn’t actually an ambassador but doesn’t everyone in the diplomatic corps have tact? No, nerves destroyed his judgement and he never recovered from his choice of opener (‘What’s the difference between a bridegroom and a cucumber?’). His attempt to regain momentum involved raising all three topics he’d specifically been told not to (my scatological university tragedy, the vastly differing weights of the bridesmaids and my Hyde Park Corner fling with a floozy). It wasn’t pretty.

3 The dance. Two lessons hadn’t been enough to master the foxtrot. Isabel’s toe crushed in the first verse of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and an elephantine triple-trampling in the second. I considered stopping in the third to summon a paramedic or podiatric specialist but she blinked away the tears, squeezed my shoulder very, very hard and whispered, ‘Keep going.’ I did, we finished with a twirl, great aunties sighed, friends said how beautiful we looked and I decided to take that at face value.

4 The consummation. Bridesmaids always ask the bride if you did or you didn’t. If you didn’t, they tell their boyfriends and husbands. Who tell all their friends. Who all snigger. So, despite fatigue and room spin and a frankly terrifying corset, we did.

Now it’s Sunday and we can relax for the first time in six months.

Lunch was fun. No ribbons or corsages or speeches or Windsor knots or place mats or chauffeurs or confetti or wish-they-hadn’t-come extended family. Just thirty of us at a pizza restaurant in Highgate going over the post-nuptial-mortem.

THE POST-MORTEM

One Boris Becker. Andy and a waitress—in a cloakroom, though, not a cupboard. He loves her. She loves him. He’s moving to Sydney when her work visa runs out next Thursday. Already started Googling for flats on Manly Beach this morning. It won’t happen.

One hospital admission. Not the vicar. He made a miraculous recovery. It was Johnson, emboldened by ‘It’s Raining Men’, who needed medical attention after he stage-dived into an adoring crowd. There was no adoring crowd. There wasn’t even a crowd. Witnesses say he scored a perfect belly flop, and in so doing broke his nose and his fifth metatarsal, and severely bruised his right testicle. Why not his left? Because it doesn’t hang as low as the right one. I wished I hadn’t asked.

One run-in with the law. My father showing love-sick Andy how to down a bottle of red wine, on the way back to the hotel at 2 a.m. ‘Evening, gentlemen, everything all right?’ ‘Yes, officer.’ ‘On our way home are we, gentlemen?’ ‘Yes, officer.’ ‘A long way, is it?’ ‘Just over there, officer.’ ‘Best be on our way then, hadn’t we, gentlemen?’ ‘Yes, officer.’ ‘Will you be taking the bollard with you?’ ‘No, sir.’

One storming out. Surprise, surprise, Watzerface who is the girlfriend of Alex who is the best friend of my wife who clearly isn’t always a good judge of character.

Why did Watzerface storm out?

Official reason from Alex, while sadly not choking on his goat’s-cheese pizza (amazing, he can even manage to find a pretentious flavour of pizza): ‘She wanted marriage, but it felt too soon. You can’t rush such an important decision, can you? Marriage should be for life, not a month or two. I’m so upset that she couldn’t give me more time.’ Misty-eyed nods from bridal group, eye-rolling from me, Andy and Johnson. He’s confusing marriage with rescue dogs, and the girls lap it up.

Real reason: she’d had to find her own way to the church and reception because Alex, after much begging, had been given the job of chauffeuring. He’d been told ‘nothing flash’ then turned up with a white coach and six horses, none of which he could properly control. He had worn tailored tails and a waistcoat strikingly similar to mine except not from Hong Kong. He’d spent the whole service muttering gloomy imprecations, especially during the vows, which meant the vicar, sensing possibilities, had repeated the ‘Can anyone see any lawful impediment?’ question … twice.

Even before our first dance had finished, he’d tapped me on the shoulder, then refused to give Isabel to anyone else for the next three dances. And, once prised away, he’d marched up onto the stage, handed out sheet music to the band, declared how much he loved his best-friend-in-all-the-world Isabel, spat out how delighted he was she’d found the perfect man, then sang Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’. If I hadn’t been so busy vomiting, I would have stormed out too.

Home late to the flat. More lugging over the threshold on Isabel’s insistence, accompanied by what I took to be slightly sarcastic clapping from one of the idiots from the upstairs flat. India tomorrow. Tired, so tired.

Monday 2 May

‘Someone’s stolen my passport!’ I was completely sure of it.

‘No, they haven’t.’ But Isabel wasn’t.

‘Yes, they have.’

‘No, they haven’t.’

‘Yes, they have.’

‘No, they haven’t.’

It doesn’t take long for the matrimonial harmony to wear off, does it?

‘Yes, they have, I had it on the Tube and that bloke opposite looked shifty.’

‘So you were pickpocketed?’

‘Yes, he must have followed us.’

‘Thought you said you were like a coiled spring when you were travelling, a coiled anti-pickpocket spring.’

‘Yes, well…’

‘That if anyone tried it on with you, there’d be a blur, a flash and a whimper.’

‘I—’

‘That they’d be picking up their teeth with broken fingers.’

‘Shut up and help me look in these bags!’

‘Don’t snap at your wife.’

‘Yes, well, my wife is being incredibly unhelpful, the flight’s about to leave and someone’s run off with my passport.’

‘Is it at home?’

‘What?’

‘Have you left your passport at home?’

‘Of course I haven’t.’

‘You always leave something at home.’

‘Don’t.’ ‘Do.’ ‘Don’t!’ ‘Do.’ ‘Don’t!’

‘What about Paris?’

‘That wasn’t a passport. That was the tickets.’

‘Stop frowning. You always frown.’

‘Hardly a surprise with you nagging all the time.’

‘You’ll get wrinkles if you scrunch your face like that. You were doing that right through the whole wedding.’

‘I was nervous.’

‘You looked like you were about to be tortured.’

‘You told me not to look at you affectionately because you’d start blubbing.’

‘Yes, but not for the whole day.’

‘Well, I was nervous. It’s much easier for a bride.’

‘What?’

‘It’s easier. All you have to do is smile, look nice and walk up and down an aisle. I have four tests. I have to do the vows, I have to do a speech, I have to lead a dance, I have to have sex.’

‘Have sex? That’s difficult, is it?’

‘It is when all your bridesmaids are placing bets on it.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘You don’t be stupid.’

‘You don’t be stupid.’

‘You don’t be stupid.’

‘You don’t be stupid.’

‘You don’t be stupid.’

‘Last call for flight BA One-seven-eight to Delhi.’

‘You don’t be stupid.’

Tuesday 3 May

The passport was on the mantelpiece.

Still, another night at home recovering from the wedding was a blessing in disguise. At least, that’s what I suggested to Isabel, who didn’t seem to see it that way. Will make it up to her in India …

‘Darling, I’m sorry. I am an idiot. I will make it up to you in India.’

‘It’s okay, darling, I love that you forget things.’

‘I love that you love that I forget things.’

Ahhhh.

Why I married Isabel

There was never really any question about it. Until Isabel, I had always assumed I would simply marry the girl I happened to be going out with when it was time to get married, i.e. thirty-two. That’s how it worked for Johnson and every other bloke I knew. You spend your twenties trying to extricate yourself from any relationship that looks like it’s getting too heavy (anything more than two years is dangerous), the first two years of your thirties bracing yourself, then the rest of your life as monogamous as possible.

Isabel changed that. I suddenly got it. Even though I was only twenty-nine, I knew immediately that she was someone I’d be glad to spend the rest of my life with. Mainly because she’s different from all my other girlfriends.

In that she’s beautiful rather than somewhere between pretty and elephantine. She has short dark hair with red bits in it. She is tall but not alarmingly so. She has freckles in the summer. She has a cute dimple where she used to have a nose ring. And she would have had a cute dimple where she used to have a nipple ring but she sobered up before it was her turn in the Mexican nipple-piercing shop.

[No, that’s too shallow. It’s not about looks.]

In that she’s funny.

[Still no. Sounds like something you’d write in a personal ad (Must have GSOH).]

In that she does things impetuously. She isn’t on the conveyor belt. She’s lived in Paris and Buenos Aires; she’s spent a year teaching in the Andes and three months as a beer wench in Munich; she quite fancies showing me her favourite bar in Quito one day; she wonders if the campervan we will one day drive to Bangkok should be a classic rust-bucket or one of the rather nifty new ones. Now, she works for a charity and she loves it. But next year she might decide to become a policewoman. Who knows? She’s spontaneous.

[Still no. And I hope she doesn’t become a policewoman.]

In that we were mates within five minutes of meeting, that it felt completely natural when we moved in together, that the thought of her and me getting hitched seemed like the most exciting idea in the world ever without any question, and that I can’t wait to get on with married life. Johnson is wrong about women and I didn’t completely understand that until I met Isabel.

Friday 20 May

Back from honeymoon, which I don’t want to talk about. Ever. Except to say India wasn’t my idea. Just so pleased to be home, even if home is a one-bedroom flat at the wrong end of the mean streets of Finsbury Park.

Marmite toast, tea, hot bath, bed, sleep, lovely sleep.

Wake to a message left on the answer machine from Alex. ‘Great you’re back, Izzy babes. Can’t wait to hear all about India, babes. Hope you loved it as much as I told you you would. Give us a call, babes. Bye babes.’ Accidentally deleted.

Saturday 21 May

Slept for a whole day in lovely bed with lovely wife who still loves me despite honeymoon, then got dragged to John Lewis to rearrange wedding list. It’s a shame they let you do this. Suspect Isabel knew all along. Lets me put lots of stuff on before the wedding, lets me get all excited when people buy them for us, then switches it all around as soon as I’ve signed the marriage certificate. Clever.

STUFF I WANTED AND DIDN’T GET

Gas barbecue: ‘We don’t have a garden.’ ‘We will one day.’ ‘We need something to eat off before then.’

Croquet set: same.

Black beanbag: ‘We’re not living in a bachelor pad any more.’

Rothko prints: same.

Chef ’s blowtorch: same. ‘But what about crème brûlée?’ ‘You’ll use it once and get bored.’

Juicer: ‘Boy’s toy. Pointless gadget. Kitchen clutter. No.’

Coffee machine: same.

STUFF SHE WANTED AND DID GET

Twelve dinner plates: I thought the seven we’d got would do.

Ditto side plates, bowls, spoons.

Towels: boring.

Toastie-maker: ‘Isn’t that a pointless gadget?’ ‘No, every kitchen needs one.’

Duvets: ‘But darling, we’ve got two already.’ ‘Does that include the one with the candle burn from when you were trying to impress Saskia in your horrible Acton bedsit? When you lit a hundred tea lights and she thought you were terribly sophisticated and it was all perfect until the bed caught fire? I can’t believe you told me that. I want that duvet thrown out. It’s horrid.’

Yoga mat, hairdryer, pair of Birkenstocks: ‘But darling, these aren’t even on the original list.’ ‘I don’t care, I’m still annoyed about the duvet.’ The shop assistant gives her a go-girl look and types B-I-R-K-E-N-S-T-O-C-K-S into her annoying wedding-list computer with a triumphant flourish.

Saskia. The one crazy fling of my life. The only example of me behaving like a total cad. Ever. Pretty much. I still feel bad about it but that was a long time ago. And it’s still coming back to haunt me, even now I’m married, even here at John Lewis, even though it had nothing to do with Isabel. Why did I ever tell Isabel about the bloody duvet?

Monday 23 May

I expected some sort of fanfare, going back to work. To be treated differently. I feel different. Very grown-up. Last time I saw everyone, I was Single Man, now I’m Married Man. I speak the language of Married Man. I’m part of the Holy Order of Married Men. I know the Code. I can do mother-in-law jokes.

Favourite mother-in-law joke

My father-in-law was pulled over by the police the other day. The policeman said, ‘Sir, your wife fell out of the car five miles back.’

My father-in-law replied, ‘Thank God for that, I thought I’d gone deaf.’

Second favourite mother-in-law joke

A guy brings his dog into the vet and says, ‘Could you please cut my dog’s tail off?’

The vet examines the tail and says, ‘But look here, there’s nothing wrong with his tail. Why do you want it off?’

The man replies, ‘Because my mother-in-law is coming to visit, and I don’t want anything in the house to make her think she’s welcome.’

I deserve some sort of recognition. A plaque? But all Johnson and the other blokes want to know is if I managed to consummate the marriage on the night (‘None of your business but yes’), and the girls only ask about the dress (‘It was white’), the confetti (‘Yes, there was some’) and the honeymoon (‘I don’t want to talk about it’).

Then they all see I’m not wearing a wedding ring.

‘You’re not wearing a wedding ring.’

‘No.’

‘Want to keep your options open, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Why aren’t you wearing one then?’

‘Because it’s not traditional for men to wear jewellery. And I don’t need to wear one to make sure I’m faithful. Our relationship is based on a bit more than a meaningless bit of platinum. And I looked stupid with a ring on.’

Can’t wait to get home to my wife. Got home and she’s out with bloody Alex. When she comes back, she says, ‘Well, why aren’t you wearing one?’

‘We’ve already discussed this a thousand times. It’s not traditional for men to wear jewellery.’

‘Not traditional in your family.’

‘I’ll wear one if you want.’

‘It’s up to you but I think it would be nice. You know, I’m really, really proud to wear my wedding ring.’

This is something Isabel is good at: twisting an argument so that what a minute ago sounded fair and reasonable coming out of your mouth sounds like something about as acceptable as kitten-stamping. If you were cynical, you’d interpret this as manipulative. I know Isabel though: it’s only 20 per cent manipulation, 25 per cent misguided reasonableness and 55 per cent being typically female.

Tuesday 24 May

Pub crisis meeting with Andy and Johnson. Johnson starts, as he always does, by sucking in his cheeks, crossing his elbows and rocking back on his bar stool authoritatively. He reminds me, as he also always does, that he’s been married for ten difficult years; that if he can do it, married to the woman he is, then anyone can. What he doesn’t know about patching up quarrels, dodging marital bullets and ducking domestic pincer movements isn’t worth wasting good beer time discussing.